… We spoke of “playfulness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that the Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors — the ones who drank with us at the Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up our pants and skirts — we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.
… I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up… [Many professors] seemed to favor [opportunists] over the hard workers, whose patient, sedimentary study habits and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic postmodernism…
Walter Kirn recalls his undergraduate years at Princeton.
April 18th, 2009 at 8:06AM
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April 18th, 2009 at 10:35AM
Thanks for this link. I’ll need to read this book when it comes out. The excerpt is disturbing on many levels. I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the early days of High Theory, and while I managed to evade many of the traps Kirn describes, I found them in abundance when I went on the market in the early 90’s. The politics became very complex–recursive, even–and I thought back to the advice the Grad School Prof In Charge Of Placement had given his charges as we trooped to our first MLA interviews: "if you go into the room and there’s a picture of Foucault on a dartboard, it could be an invitation, or it could be a trap."
Hard to know which way to turn in such circumstances.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:26AM
> "I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself."
Since UD has a wide range of readers, I’m curious: Did any of the science folks think this way when they were in school?
April 18th, 2009 at 1:02PM
The answer is no – at least for me.
One of the things that drew me to science was not having to suck up to assholes in the English (with all due respect) or other (non-science) departments.
f = ma
If you get the right answer and can prove it, there is no argument. Science is a lot less subjective than other non-scientific disciplines.
I’ll give an example. I once took a mob English course where a great man lectured and all the exams were graded by TA’s. We were on the quarter system. I got an A, a B, and a C in this course. There were two graders. I always got an A on my exams from the first grader and a C from the other.
Another example. I took a freshman philosophy class and wrote a paper claiming that Plato was an idiot -> grade C. As a senior I took a political theory class and submitted a very similar paper, at least as far as the ideas were concerned –> Grade A.
Q.E.D.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:29PM
When universities bemoan the fact that too many students choose to major in disciplines such as Economics, Political Science, and History (see, for example, http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/07/0402/1b.shtml) they need only to read narratives like these and understand that many undergraduates want no part of such a humanities scene. It’s not that the students are dense, but rather many are very capable of seeing through the antics, posturing, and sycophancy.